Read Online Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill by Diana Athill - Free Book Online Page B

nakedness, she wouldn’t mind if we happened to see her without clothes. Clearly she was half-hoping for these innovations rather than ordaining them. ‘Good heavens!’ was what we thought, staring at her with a mixture of admiration and embarrassment at her daring. We saw at once that she was doing the sort of thing we did ourselves, defying the established order in a fit of ‘over-excitement’. It was generous of her, but it was also foolish. We did try out their Christian names once or twice, for the fun of it, but ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ meant what they meant, whereas the names were empty, so there was no point in going on with it. And as for seeing my mother and father naked – that was a most uncomfortable idea. Child to child, nakedness was nothing; child to adult, it was outside our experience and ought to stay there. So progressive informality went the way of pocket money. Lines of conduct or systems of any sort, apart from those hallowed by custom, were too much trouble to keep up. Our laziness, although it was often chided by the grown-ups, was sheltered by theirs.
    My own lack of will-power worried me in only one way, which fortunately cropped up only when lessons included doing sums. At these I was so bad that I felt it must be blameworthy. The others understood ‘fractions’ and ‘decimals’ quite easily, so surely I too ought to be able to understand them – surely if I tried hard enough I could? I never did, so that must mean that although I felt that I was trying hard enough, I wasn’t. I was never bullied about it – indeed, much kindness and patience went into attempts to help me – but I still felt twinges of guilt from time to time. It wasn’t until many years into adulthood that I learnt something that suggested the incapacity was not my fault.
    Five counters of different colours lined up on a table; the three-year-old child, already so good at the alphabet, being taught to count: one, two, three, four, five. I get it right at once and Mummy is delighted: ‘Look, she can count up to five already!’ But by the time an audience has collected the counters have been shuffled, and this time I say ‘Five, two, four, three, one’. ‘No, darling …’ but I insist ‘Yes’. They try again and again, until suddenly someone understands that I had never been counting, I had been naming. The yellow counter at the end of the row is called ‘five’, and it is still called ‘five’ when it comes at the beginning. They have to give up or I would be in tears at their misunderstanding. It was many days before I grasped what they meant by ‘counting’, and I was to remain a namer, not a numberer, for the rest of my life: a trait as innate as colour blindness, for which I could justifiably feel regret, but not guilt.
     
     
    Guilt never caused me any serious distress, but humiliation did: humiliation, even if caused by something trivial, hit directly on surface nerves and was the sharpest misery I knew. To look silly. As soon as I took it into my head that something made me look silly, it became impossible to bear.
    ‘Oh, do stop grizzling. Look, if you’re really cold get down and run – that’ll warm you up in no time.’ Seven years old, I was perched on the front seat of the dog-cart between Mum and Revel, the groom. It was a bitter afternoon in January and we were bouncing over the frozen tussocks of Longmeadow, having taken a bale of hay up to some ponies out to grass. Much of the family’s time was spent in such occupations, pleasures disguised as jobs and pursued as earnestly as any job. Revel could have taken the hay out by himself, but the dog-cart existed, yellow and black, elegant on its high wheels in a wasp-like way, and there was a young mare who would look good in it if she could be broken to harness. Mum was working at this, making use of opportunities to drive her out over the fields, getting her accustomed to being between shafts before taking her out to meet traffic